By Vivek Paion October 28, 2015
The Government’s National DigiLocker has reached nearly a million users, just a thousand short of the milestone at the time of writing. Overall, the website has stored over 1.069 million documents, indicating that on an average users store less than 2 documents on the platform. The most uploaded document is the Aadhaar card, which is required for signing up on the platform in the first place.
Note that the platform only offers each user dedicated 10 MB of space, which is likely why most people can upload nothing but a high-res scanned copy of their Aadhaar cards. 10 MB per user for a million users equals to about 10 TB in storage, which is slightly less than double the storage space available on my desktop. We really wish the platform provided more space to store other documents as well, buying a few HDDs shouldn’t be this much of a problem for the Government.
On logging in, users can also view issued documents. The platform claims to have issued 4.36 million documents via 2 issuer organizations, the majority of which are income certificates, integrated certificates and residence certificate. Other than this, it also issued caste certificates, one-and-the-same certificate, possession certificate and nativity certificate among others. The two issuing agencies are Mee Seva AP and Kerala eDistrict.
Growth in users peaked in July: Interestingly, the digital locker saw a spurt of growth from May to July, with the number of registered users jumping up from ~200,000 to nearly 900,000. Post this period, and especially in September and October, the registrations have slowed down significantly. Documents uploaded also saw significant growth from May to July, which it continued to witness in the last couple of months, despite the slowdown in number of registrations.
More than 10% of the users came from Maharashtra: State-wise, the highest number of registrations came from Maharashtra with over a 114,000 users, the only state to have over a 100,000 users. Maharashtra is followed by Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Kerala. A few states saw registrations of less than 1000 per state, including Goa, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, while few others didn’t even have 100 users registered on the portal. These include Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Uttaranchal, West Bengal and surprisingly New Delhi.
The DigiLocker was launched by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) in February this year. Every user gets 10 MB of dedicated free personal storage space, which is linked to their Aadhaar details. The URI (Uniform Resource Indicator) for every document is also stored in the e-locker, allowing government agencies to directly access the document from the repository.